Have you looked at your energy bill lately? Felt the pain at the
pump? Has solar been on your mind as a way to decrease and stabilize
your business or home energy cost? You're not alone.

However,
translating desire for renewable into action has for the most part been
a fairly technical endeavor, fraught with labyrinthine data that only
an engineer could hope to make sense of. Doing your own comparison
shopping, seeing for yourself what potential your location has for
generating power, and how much that will offset or replace your current
utility needs has meant calling your local companies, having them come
out to do an estimate or create a computer model, and then tell you
what it all means.

What if you want to find out for yourself? Make your own, more informed decisions before talking with a company? Good luck.

Renewzle
does much of the heavy lifting for you, asking only basic information
about where you live, what your monthly bill is now, and who your
utility provider is. It then gives you an estimated cost for a system,
how much it would save you, and how much CO2 you would be eliminating.
You can tinker with the variables (% energy offset by solar, income,
financing, etc) to get a more fine grained idea of the possibilities,
then get estimates from solar power providers.

But, you may find
yourself asking, is this really an accurate picture? It doesn't know
anything about my house, what the roof is like, where the sun is in
relation to it, or how long it's exposed a day. It's simple to use, but
perhaps for some a bit too simplistic.

RoofRay, a site currently in beta, looks like a possible answer to these questions. And more.

Google Maps, you are able to see exactly what your house looks like
from the air, how large the roof is, and simulate putting panels on it.
Input data like the roof's angle, and it can give a fairly close to
accurate indicator of your home or business's energy potential.

RoofRay's
founders were clearly motivated by the same desires as who they seek to
serve, starting the site after they had ballooning utility bills,
sought out estimates for solar on their home, and found it overwhelming
to make sense of. As they put it,

"We're not 'Green freaks'. We do believe in good stewardship of our
planet but we're also realists. The economics must make sense for
meaningful success. We think we can play a part in that."

Increasing the site's usefulness is the ability to see what the
solar energy potential of other houses and businesses are. You can see
where this is going: In an increasingly energy conscious and cost
pinched society, people will want to know what results they could
expect in a house or business space they're considering buying.

RoofRay
seeks to make alliances with realtors and real estate listing sites to
incorporate this information. In this, they hope to help speed along
and make simpler the diffusion of solar energy.

Readers: What other ways do you see making renewable energy an easier and clear choice for a broader segment of the population?

Paul Smith is a sustainable business innovator, the founder of GreenSmith Consulting, and has an MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio School of Management
in San Francisco. His overarching talent is "bottom lining" complex
ideas, in a way that is understandable and accessible to a variety of
audiences, internal and external to a company.